The promise of tech has been that if we let it rip, we'll have a better democracy and living conditions for all. That promise has failed to materialise, for a variety of reasons. There is increased surveillance, enshittification, huge subscription fees, and upward pressure on climate change (directly linked to bitcoin mining then AI data centres). Then you get Musk lobbying against a city's plans to build a public transport network, so he can build an unsafe single-car tunnel for the rich.
I think people are quite justified in being skeptical of new technology, especially when the track record has shown that the promised societal benefits often never actually materialise. Worse, still, the money earned from selling the new technology is used to make conditions worse for most people. Big tech has a lot to answer for.
I'd be less skeptical if the values of tech capitalism shifted to become more pro-human. They really haven't, and they probably won't. So for now, consider me bearish on new tech.
Sorry, "tech" is not some catch-all for all the new things. "Tech" has given us wonderful new medicine and safer cars and faster internet.
Subscription fees? So "tech" should make producing a film ... free now? What exactly is your point?
Who exactly promised all these so-called benefits you keep saying you were lied about? The companies make products and services. Many, many people buy those things. Both sides are happy, transaction over. What "greater good" are you complaining about, exactly and who promised it to whom?
Is your point that busses aren't profitable? Why do they need to be?
I am sure if you did the math, having the occasional empty bus does not hold a candle to the amount of dead mass being dragged along in single-occupant cars.
The wear-and-tear on the road from the sheer volume of cars alone makes them cost more to us as a society than busses.
So regardless of density and passenger volume, busses are incredible.
> The wear-and-tear on the road from the sheer volume of cars alone makes them cost more to us as a society than busses.
That doesn't really math, because axle weight is a large factor in road wear. There's details and it doesn't always apply, but the commonly used rule of thumb is that "road wear increases in proportion to the fourth power of its axle load."
If a transit bus weighs at least 25000 lbs and has two axles [2] and a F-150 has an average weight of 5000 lbs with two axles [3], you get a lot more road wear from putting a bunch of people on a bus compared to all of them driving their f-150s by themselves. The power rule says the wear from one bus is equivalent to 625 F-150s. Although if people rode around in classic Beetles (~ 2000 lbs), there'd be even less road wear, and things would be a lot groovier.
iOS and macOS don’t “correspond” in any way, shape, or form. Completely different releases. Their release windows tend to be close (by design) but there ‘s no “correspondence” here.
-The US has had a lot of success by letting businesses run pretty free. This has produced some of the largest and most powerful companies on the planet.
-The conservative party traditionally has been suspicious of a powerful, centralized government
-In the US, there is a common thread of "government workers are impossible to fire" as well as a common thread of "government moves at a snail's pace".
In light of just that, there are many people who would prefer that healthcare is run by a private industry, as private insurers are enormous companies in the US. Everyone knows Blue Cross Blue Shield, Aetna, or Kaiser Permanente. Many people give a benefit of the doubt that companies are doing things efficiently. Additionally, health insurance companies in the US have a requirement to spend a certain % of their revenue each year on medical care, and will sometimes send out small refunds when they simply cannot suppress costs in certain other regions of the company enough to keep their spending at the right rates.
Beyond this, states may provide additional benefits, and many do (some with the help of federal funding, even). You may find someone in one state where they are suffering greatly, while someone in an identical economic situation in another state is not suffering at all. It's easy to convince the first man to vote for a better healthcare situation. It's hard to convince the latter.
I could go on for ages, but this is getting long. There are like a billion reasons.
> there are many people who would prefer that healthcare is run by a private industry,
The grammar is a little ambiguous around this, but you seem to be claiming that this is a majority position. It isn't. Single payer polls over 50% basically every time it's tested (the exception being some spun partisan reframings you occasionally see pushed), and has for decades.
The people who vote are old. The median age of primary voters is 65, regular voters 54. This is why you get a gerontocracy - old people vote for their interests, and young people don't vote. It's also probably why the median age of politicians has risen to 58 and 66 in the house and senate, respectively. With an 80-year-old president.
The solution is to have both a) mandatory voting and b) a voting holiday. This is done in many other democracies around the world, and it works. Personally I would prefer term limits and age limits for congress, the president, and federal judges. Diane Feinstein, Ruth Bater Ginsberg died in office. Mitch McConnell is working on it. We have age limits for lots of professions that require high performance - political leadership should not be an exception. But of course to make any of these changes young people have to vote, but they're mostly busy being poor and doomscrolling to block out the pain.
Easy. No corporate social media networks. Hobbyists run local light social networks (such as forums) again (like they do currently; see Mastodon, Lemmy), with super efficient SSR HTML that is cheap to host.
> Yes it does. Hobbyists are willing to spend their own money, hence their blog doesn't need ads.
Until it is unsustainable which is the majority of cases due to no funding.
> Wikipedia is donation supported.
The majority of websites are not as big as Wikipedia, let alone having donations in the tens of millions.
The GP talks about Mastodon which hobbyists run and users sign up to instances to have their social identity on.
toot.community, mastodon.cloud and many others are closing down this month due to no funding.
And even some organisations don't want to run instances due to it being expensive. (1.)
Even mozilla.social shut down.
Sure, these services wouldn't run ads, but they can't charge users either which leaves donations as the only way to fund it, and 9.9/10 times it doesn't work.
Using Wikipedia as an example to prove a point about donations makes no sense for everyone else who also contribute to the open web for free.
I'll concede that it doesn't work out a lot of the time. This is not very different from for-profit websites. Also, your number of 9.9/10 is probably pulled out of your ass. I'm note sure what the real number is, but I'd wager it's lower than 9.9/10.
I'm not sure how old you are, but in the early 2000s there were so many community forums; most of them survived. Even if it doesn't, the community can go to another host at some point.
For every Wikipedia or Thunderbird that gets millions in donations you get thousands of others that cannot live off sparse donations alone.
And since you are lazy to read the article:
"After three years of running our Fediverse server, we're shutting it down. Not because we've given up on the Fediverse, but because it isn't safe or sustainable enough for a community org like ours to run a server on a shoestring...
...Since 2024, all of our core funding and funding bids have fallen away. The server dwindled to three active users, and the operating costs and effort of keeping it maintained were no longer worth it for our economy of scale. It was a bigger cost, and more effort, than the rest of our hosting put together."
This is one of many examples of hobbyist / community run instances of what you describe, as donations didn't even work for them and they shut down.
Remember, they cannot do ads or subscriptions, so donations are their only way to be sustainable.
> I'm not sure how old you are, but in the early 2000s...
Spare us your fallacious "back in the old days" argument, we aren't there anymore, we are talking about now.
The issue they are having is moderation, not technical costs. This is the same issue sites like Reddit have. In the article, they even mention that private social media sites use moderation centres from poor countries. That is abhorrent. Not sure why you are advocating for this?
> Spare us your fallacious "back in the old days" argument, we aren't there anymore, we are talking about now.
From my perspective, what is the point of continuing this conversation if you won't address an example in the past where my argument worked?
> The issue they are having is moderation, not technical costs. This is the same issue sites like Reddit have. In the article, they even mention that private social media sites use moderation centres from poor countries. That is abhorrent. Not sure why you are advocating for this?
You go an admit that you haven't read the article and then you knowingly make a strawman argument saying I support "social media sites using moderation centres from poor countries"
Where did I even explicitly say I supported this? You just made that up and you know it.
The argument is about funding without ads, those that run hobbyist federated social media like Mastodon cannot use Ads or subscriptions, so they need to use donations (which is unsustainable)
Even if you throw in moderation, isn't even worth it if you're running a costly Mastodon instance and no donations are coming in.
> From my perspective, what is the point of continuing this conversation if you won't address an example in the past where my argument worked?
Because they simply don't work today and at scale. We have new problems today that didn't exist in the past.
> You go an admit that you haven't read the article and then you knowingly make a strawman argument saying I support "social media sites using moderation centres from poor countries"
To clear it up, I read the article before my most recent reply to you. The very article that you linked mentions that private social networks use moderation centres from poor countries. Did you read the article you linked to me before sending it?
> Because they simply don't work today and at scale. We have new problems today that didn't exist in the past.
So your response is just to throw your hands up and say "won't work". Buddy, let me tell you, we could squeeze out a lot more performance to run social networks if we needed to. The hard part is the moderation, as you correct identified. But private-run social networks use questionable labour to moderate anyway (as per the article you linked).
In the past running a hobbyist social media worked, it can work again.
Mastodon isn't a good example. It's written in Ruby and serves up a heavy React application. A light version of it could be written in something much faster, and served up on something much smaller.
You haven't provided a coherent argument to suggest otherwise. Goodbye and thanks for the discussion.
The problem is the creepy big-data-advert-ocracy might propagate that scarlet-letter in ways that are unfair an unpredictable.
So a throwaway account for reading Reddit (even as it decays) might lead to an totally unrelated account you do care about getting unfairly suspended, or the MonopolyCloudFlareBot "helping" your bank starts rejecting your IP/browser-fingerprint, etc.
This would worry me less if we had laws that make it easy to demand accountability and fixes, but we don't. (Not much in the US, and in the EU efficacy is still questionable.)
We should be careful to distinguish between "everything goes back to normal" versus "they you move your money to some other bank."
Anywho, you're right that the final example is more-likely to be resolved, thanks to a formal customer relationship backed up by decades of law plus physical locations... but what about Reddit, Facebook, Amazon, Google, etc. where they sometimes don't even have any remotely responsive support system or nearby physical branch?
Basically I'm saying we have some Kafkaesque stuff out there, it isn't sensible or fair, and if someone wants to tweak the nose of the beast they should at least consider the range of what could go wrong.
That doesn't mean that it will actually be resolved. And do you really want to be doing that with everyone you ever do business with for the rest of your life?
Not currently, but we are going to add some features in the future to allow users to report courses that have content that needs to be reviewed for false hoods or any other reasons. In the meantime, if you do see this feel free to email us and we can address it.
I think people are quite justified in being skeptical of new technology, especially when the track record has shown that the promised societal benefits often never actually materialise. Worse, still, the money earned from selling the new technology is used to make conditions worse for most people. Big tech has a lot to answer for.
I'd be less skeptical if the values of tech capitalism shifted to become more pro-human. They really haven't, and they probably won't. So for now, consider me bearish on new tech.
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